1916

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “You have us, Mother; you shall always have us,” Willie assured her. “Pat will be here any moment, you’ll see.”

  When at last Count Plunkett’s motorcar came down the drive, Ned and his companions gave the traditional three shouts of welcome. Pearse put his head out of the window and looked up at the roof, then responded with a wave that brought on a second round of cheering. Boys tossed their caps in the air and pummeled each other’s shoulders.

  That evening a weary Pearse reported to the staff of Saint Enda’s, “Our mission was a success, I feel. Most audiences were responsive. The thousand pounds I’ve already sent home should satisfy our more pressing creditors, which means we can reopen next September. And there is the promise of more to come; our American friends plan to arrange dances, stage fund-raisers, that sort of thing.”

  Privately he confided to Ned, “Not only the school will benefit. We have pledges of aid for the Volunteers as well. Your sister, God be good to her, is one of those who has promised to raise money for us in New York.”

  “My sister? Kathleen Campbell?”

  “Indeed. A fine woman and very devout; she came to my lecture escorted by her priest.”

  “Bedad,” muttered Ned, an expression he had picked up from Thomas MacDonagh.

  Pearse shot him a sharp look of reprimand. What the headmaster might tolerate from his friends was unacceptable from his students.

  Ned was about to become more than a student, however. The very next day Pearse, who had been appointed as organizing director for the Volunteers, entrusted him with carrying dispatches for the corps.

  “You will need reliable transportation,” Pearse said, “so I am asking Roger Casement to buy you a bicycle from the Volunteers’ treasury. The funds are a little depleted at present, but he’s going to America soon to raise more. You can ride a bicycle, of course?”

  “I can, sir. My father had one.”

  “Then so shall you.”

  By Friday a sturdy new machine was delivered to Saint Enda’s. Black, with shiny handlebars. After his last class of the afternoon Ned went for a gravel-churning spin up and down the drive and concluded with a circle of the forecourt, no-hands, to the jibes of envious classmates.

  That weekend he began making trips farther afield. From Saint Enda’s he could reach O’Connell Bridge in forty-five minutes with ease. One of his first calls in the city was to Thomas Clarke, proprietor of a news agency and tobacconist’s at 75A Parnell Street. “Tom is one of the hard-liners of the republican movement,” Pearse explained before sending Ned to him. “He’s a plain man with a rigid code, and a Fenian to the depths of his soul.

  “He took part in a dynamiting campaign in England back in the 1880s, offshoot of a failed Irish Rising. It cost him fifteen years in English jails. They starved him and they tortured him, but they could not break him. When he was released he went to the United States, and even became an American citizen, but he never stopped working for the cause of Irish freedom. Eventually he came home to serve on the Supreme Council of the IRB. We have not been able to persuade him to join the executive body of the Volunteers, though.2 He believes his name would do us more harm than good, and I’m sure he’s right.”

  Pearse’s words had excited Ned’s curiosity, but whatever he expected it was not the slight, frail man who blinked at him from behind a pair of cheap spectacles. Clarke was in his late fifties, but his sunken cheeks and seedy, drooping mustache made him look a decade older. Life had scraped him to the bone.

  “Pádraic Pearse sent me,” Ned began, holding out a folded note.

  Clarke took the paper without comment and read it while Ned waited, shifting from one foot to the other. Then the older man slowly removed his spectacles.

  The eyes that locked with Ned’s were not old and frail, but fierce as an eagle’s. “Thank you,” Tom Clarke said simply.

  He is wearing a mask! Ned thought, delighted with his own perception. A mask of old age and weakness, with the ardent young dynamiter concealed behind it.

  Dynamiter. Tom Clarke had been willing to kill people in the name of Ireland. Surely that made him a monster. Yet how could anyone Mr. Pearse admired be a monster? Ned struggled to understand. Was it not possible to love Ireland and want to see her free, without having to resort to violence?

  That night he pored over his history books until dawn, tracing the course of one attempt after another to gain justice for Ireland through the British political system. One failure after another.

  The system did not work; not for the Irish.

  He began to understand how rage and frustration could create a man like Tom Clarke.

  “It should not be that way,” Ned whispered to himself as the first pale gray light seeped into the room. “But what choice have they given us?”

  When he returned to the shop a few days later with another message, Clarke had him wait while he wrote out a reply. A gentle but relentless rain was falling. Ned brushed water from his sleeves and shoulders until he realized he was getting the papers on the counter damp.

  “Desperate weather,” remarked the shopkeeper.

  “It is desperate,” the young man agreed. Weather was the universal language.

  “And no end to the ram.”

  “No end at all.”

  “Still, there are worse places to be. Hotter, drier…but just not Ireland.”

  “I know,” said Ned. “I’d rather be here than anywhere. I…I had a chance to live in America once, but I turned it down.”

  Clarke gave him a penetrating look, then asked abruptly, “Do you follow politics?”

  “I try to.”

  “Then you’re aware that the Home Rule Bill is in serious difficulties. First there was the suggestion that any Ulster county might, by vote, be allowed to exempt itself from Home Rule for six years. That was bad enough. But just look at today’s papers.” Clarke drummed the nearest stack with an angry finger. “Now the House of Lords has cobbled together an exclusion amendment for nine northern counties forever! John Redmond didn’t offer a word of protest, either.

  “All the Orangemen had to do to get their own way was threaten violence. There’s a lesson for us in that, mark my words. Diplomatic maneuvering is a stalling tactic for the British, but they respond to physical force right smartly. Remember, they built an empire with sword and gun.”

  Ned said, “That’s why it’s hard to believe the government of Britain would give in to a relatively small corps like the UVF.”

  “Not hard at all, when you think of it. Asquith desperately needs the support of the Unionist Party members in Parliament. No one is as vulnerable to intimidation as politicians trying to hold on to power. And Ireland, as always, will have to pay the price. I tell you, lad, if the exclusion amendment’s adopted it will amount to the partition of our country.”

  “Partition?” Ned considered the word. “Two Irelands?”

  “That’s the idea, and a damned bad one. It would be like cutting off an arm from the body to separate the north from the rest of us. The whole island’s no bigger than the American state of Pennsylvania; we can’t afford partition either socially or economically. It’s madness.” Tom Clarke squared his thin shoulders. “Ireland,” he vowed fiercely, “shall not be mutilated to please the minority.”

  His anger and his resolve communicated themselves to Ned. He felt an increased sense of the importance of the messages he was carrying. The recipients were Catholics and Protestants, poets and professional men, academics and the near illiterate, members of the Ascendancy and unemployed laborers. Some, like Sir Roger Casement, had illustrious backgrounds in the service of Britain.

  All had Irish nationalism in common, although it was difficult to separate the varying shades of opinion. They ran the gamut from simple espousal of the republican ideal to a burning passion for all-out revolution.

  As the school year came to a close in mid-June, Ned completed his final term. Aunt Norah wrote to congratulate him. “Your letters sound so grown-up these days,” she s
aid. “All the books you must have read—your father would be so proud. Will you be coming back to the farm soon? We do look forward to taking care of our own dear boy once more.”

  The letter was no more than a gentle hint, but Ned sat for a long time holding it in his hands and staring off into the distance. Thanks to Lord Inchiquin’s kindness, he was equipped to be much more than a farmer. In the autumn he might apply for a position on the staff at Saint Enda’s, a teaching apprenticeship that would prepare him for an academic career.

  Or—and this was an idea that kept nagging at the edges of his mind—he might go to work for a newspaper. Henry Mooney made journalism seem a most attractive profession.

  The one thing he did not want to do now, if he was being honest with himself, was go back to the farm.

  The weeks he had spent on the farm before he came to Dublin had taught Ned a bitter lesson. Lost loved ones left agonizing holes in the landscape. Perhaps if he had never come away he would have made his peace with grief by now. But he had missed that chance.

  At any rate, the decision did not have to be made immediately. Because his allowance from Lord Inchiquin had ceased on the last day of school, Frank had begun sending him some money. Frank Halloran did not have their father’s gift for making the land prosper and was able to spare only a little. But Ned reckoned it would be sufficient if he had a roof over his head already.

  He wrote his aunt:

  Once again I have decided to stay at the school for the summer, helping Mr. MacRory, the chief gardener. In a way he reminds me of Papa. Though he has no formal education, he can quote Rabelais or chant a Gaelic rann with equal facility, and has won seven medals for oratory (sometimes he wears them all on the same day!). What might such a man not aspire to in an Ireland that valued him?

  Mr. Pearse is involved in matters which will keep him away from Saint Enda’s much of the time. At some stage he hopes to go down to Rosmuc in Connemara, where he has a little cottage, for a brief holiday.3 It will do him a power of good if he knows the school is being well looked after. Perhaps when the new term starts in September I shall come home.

  He prudently neglected to mention his position as a courier. To Kathleen, however, he wrote, “I am needed here to do important work for the Volunteers—something I do not want to tell them about at home. Norah would worry. But you understand.”

  On the last Friday in June, Ned went with the Fianna to a large rally in Bodenstown. The rally was attended by the Irish Volunteers and the labor movement’s newly named Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly.

  Beside the grave of the famous Irish patriot Wolfe Tone, Thomas Clarke spoke of nationalism. Clarke lacked Pádraic Pearse’s bardic tongue, but his simple words carried their own weight. As everyone there knew, he had already sacrificed fifteen years of his life for Ireland.

  “If we’re ever to be granted the dignity of Home Rule on this island,” Clarke told his audience, “we must be as prepared to fight for it as the unionists are prepared to fight against it.”

  Ned applauded wildly. Everyone did, except for a small knot of nondescript men who stood off to one side, listening impassively.

  At the conclusion of the meeting Seán MacDermott read cables of congratulation. One, from John Devoy in America, said, “Best wishes for meeting at the grave of Wolfe Tone, the Protestant apostle of Irish nationalism. The voice from the grave forbids partition, and brands as infamous any man who consents to exclude Ulster for even one day.”4

  The following Monday, Ned was sent to collect a parcel at Eamonn Ceannt’s house in the South Circular Road and take it to Clarke. He sped into the city whistling, feeling himself one of the company of heroes. Once he cut in front of a long, gleaming Hupmobile and grinned over his shoulder when the driver gave an angry blast of the horn. “Up the Irish!” Ned called back cheekily.

  When he delivered the parcel Clarke offered him a packet of cigarettes. “You should have something more for your trouble than just my thanks.”

  “I don’t smoke, sir.”

  “Do you not? Good enough. But here, have one of these anyway.” From beneath the counter he produced a bowl heaped with fruit. “I buy them from the stalls around the Pillar to give to the children,” Clarke explained. “Parents in this neighborhood can’t afford to buy fruit for their little ones.”

  Murmuring thanks, Ned slipped an apple into his pocket. He was just leaving the shop when he saw someone he knew across the street.

  “What brings you into the city, Ned?” Síle Duffy asked when his bicycle pulled up alongside her.

  “I was doing a message for a friend.”

  “Oh. And where are you going now?”

  “Back to Rathfarnham, I suppose,” he replied, dismounting from the machine to walk along the curb with her. “What about you?”

  “To Mrs. Drumgold’s.”

  “May I escort you there?”

  Her eyes widened. “Och no!…I mean…” She was horrified at the thought. Going to Mrs. Drumgold’s would mark him as a client, someone with cash in hand to pay for services rendered. Ned was no client. Please God, there had to be something in her life other than men who wanted to buy her!

  To cover her confusion she fixed her gaze on his bicycle. “That’s very nice, so.” She pursed her lips as if thinking. “I’ve never ridden on one. Do you suppose you could carry me on the crossbar?”

  Ned was taken aback. The suggestion was incredibly daring. Only once had he seen a young man carrying a girl on his bicycle, and people had turned in the street to stare after them.

  “Sitting on the crossbar would be terribly uncomfortable,” he told her. “Besides, you’d be in the way of my knees.”

  “Please?” She looked at him so beguilingly that any argument went out of his head.

  “All right, but you sit on the saddle and I’ll stand on the pedals.” He held the bicycle steady while she seated herself. She was wearing white lilac scent again. For one dizzying moment her skirts were pushed aside and he had a glimpse of her black-stockinged leg almost to the knee. Then he mounted the bicycle in front of her and felt her hands grip his waist. They went spinning down the street with her delighted laughter ringing in his ears.

  Ned was in a state of delicious anguish. “Where do you want to go?” he called over his shoulder.

  “I don’t care. Anywhere. The strand! Let’s go look at the sea.”

  They followed Parnell Street to Summerhill, thence to Fairview. The afternoon was magic. Dublin was gilded by summer; flowers bloomed in the tiny front gardens of every house they passed.

  Beyond the railway embankment an empty stretch of grassland gave onto the seafront. They rode as far as the beach, then dismounted and walked the bicycle along the sand. When they came to a deserted spot sheltered from landward sight by dunes topped with coarse grass, Síle said, “Stop here, Ned. This is perfect.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  Instead of answering, she pointed toward the peninsula whose promontory dominated the north side of Dublin Bay. “Look out there at the Hill of Howth. Isn’t it lovely in the sunshine?”

  Ned quoted:

  On the strand of Howth

  Breaks a sounding wave;

  A lone sea-gull screams

  Above the bay.5

  Síle was impressed. “Did you make that up just now?”

  “I did not. It’s from a poem by Pádraic Pearse.”

  “Do you know many poems?”

  “Some. My father could quote reams, and of course we study poetry in school. Both the Irish poets and the English.”

  She ran her eyes over him, measuring. “It’s hard to believe you’re still in school. Back home, a man like you would be walking out with his sweetheart.”

  He felt heat rise in his cheeks.

  She saw the flush. “Have you no girl, then?” she asked teasingly. “That’s a pity. So tall and strong, and no girl yet.” Folding her knees, she sank onto the warm sand and patted the space beside her. “Come sit by me.”<
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  Ned laid the bicycle on its side, then reached into his pocket and took out the apple Clarke had given him. “Here, we can share this.” He spread his jacket on the sand for her to sit on. They gazed together at the summer-blue sea and the soaring gulls. “On the strand of Howth breaks a sounding wave,” Síle murmured.

  Biting the apple in turns was an act of intimacy. He stared at the bare flesh of the fruit with her teeth marks imprinted on it.

  “What are you going to do when you leave school, Ned?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Really?” She raised one eyebrow.

  Ned was intrigued. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Lift just one eyebrow.”

  Síle gave a careless shrug. “Oh, I have many talents.” She did not tell him that she had spent hours in front of the mirror perfecting that gesture, holding one eyebrow still with her forefinger while she repeatedly raised the other until its muscles were strong enough to function independently.

  She smiled. He smiled.

  He was painfully aware of her. He could think of nothing to say; he was almost afraid to breathe.

  At last Síle broke the silence. “You don’t think…badly of me, do you, Ned?” she asked.

  “Of course not! Why should I?”

  “I was afraid your friend—the one we had tea with that day—might have said something unkind about me.”

  Against his will, Ned recalled Henry’s innuendos. “He didn’t say anything unkind.”

  “Are you certain? I hate it when people lie to me.”

  Her remark struck Ned as odd. “Do many people lie to you, Síle?”

  “All the time,” she replied with a sudden hard edge to her voice. Then she threw back her head and pushed at her wind-tousled hair with her hand. “Promise me you won’t ever lie to me, Ned,” she said earnestly. “Promise. I do so need to have a real friend, someone who will always tell me the truth.”

  Once again he was taken aback. They hardly knew one another, yet here he was alone with her on the beach and she was asking him for what amounted to a sacred vow. “I try to tell the truth to everyone, Síle. Mr. Pearse sets great store by honesty.”